-
I. Kursk Province on the Eve of the Revolution
- Central European University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
CHAPTER I Kursk Province on the Eve of the Revolution Before proceeding to a narrative of peasant collective action in Kursk Province during 1905–1906, a review of the general context in which these disturbances took place is indispensable. By almost all accounts, rural unrest in the heavily agricultural provinces of the Black Earth belt had its origins in the “land question” and scholarly treatments of peasant actions in Kursk Province are no exception in this regard.1 Yet even a cursory review of the literature suggests that this issue cannot be understood only within the framework of peasant land hunger (malozemel’e) to which it is often reduced. Rather, one must account for the ways in which both peasants and private landowners strove to adjust to economic and demographic trends that acted broadly upon the agrarian sector in the second half of the nineteenth century, a struggle that drove the interests of lords and peasants into increasing conflict. Among contemporary observers , and for much of the historiography that followed, verdicts on this process are rendered in conceptions of a “crisis of the rural economy,” marked by a decline in the fortunes of the landed nobility and impoverishment of the peasantry, as the main background to agrarian disorders. Certainly, within the limits of the land settlements that accompanied the major acts of the Great Reforms of the 1860s that regularized the status of the peasantry as “free rural inhabitants,” the natural increase in the population of Kursk Province’s country districts during the second half of the nineteenth century was to drive unfavorable trends in man:land ratios. Against the background of demographic increase, peasant agriculture in Kursk Province remained wholly extensive in character: by the mid1 Maliavskii, “Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie,” Kraevedcheskie zapiski, I: 3–69; Stepynin, Krest’ianstvo; Prilutskii, Istoricheskii opyt, 25–108. 54 Rural Unrest during the First Russian Revolution 1880s, between eight and nine out of every ten acres of allotment land had already been plowed under. Predominant tools and implements were outmoded , but had sure advantages in that they were cheap, light and durable, required a minimum of draught power and were easily repaired with locally available materials. The old short fallow system and the relationships of areas sown with various crops remained mostly unchanged. In the “classic” three-field regime of crop rotation, around a third of the arable land sown was seeded in autumn with winter crops (ozimoe pole), a third reserved for spring plantings (iarovoe pole) and a third left fallow for the whole cycle to “rest” the soil. In the succeeding year, fields sown in the previous cycle with winter crops (wheat and rye) were sown with spring grain (oats, barley, millet and buckwheat), the fallow was “raised” for winter sowings, and fields that had yielded the previous year’s spring crop were left fallow. In a survey of these practices in Tambov Province, David Kerans showed that each household was, in principle (if not in practice), free to sow what it wished and was responsible for all agricultural operations on its own strips. Yet because each household had numerous strips in each field—and in each subsection of any given field in terms of soil quality and distance from the house plots—decisions with regard to the fallow field and the timing of its raising were made collectively and were obligatory for all members. Faced with ever-more acute deficits of livestock feed, with the progressive disappearance of pasture and meadow before the plow, fodder crops nevertheless played almost no role in fallow or rotation. This circumstance greatly accentuated the obligatory character of collective decisions concerning the fallow—especially in light of a growing dearth of pastures and meadow in peasant holdings—by its increasingly central role as a first source of fodder after winter’s meager stall feeding.2 Contemporary agronomy condemned peasant techniques and methods of cultivation as perilously archaic, but they rested on the sanction of tradition and enjoyed the benefits of simplicity, predictability and community -wide acceptance. These critics also tended to forget that short fallow regimes represented a major advance over long fallow systems and the ancient slash-and-burn methods. Peasant cultivation was, moreover, by no means static. Steady expansion of potato crops after 1891 made a crucial 2 Confino, Systèmes agraires; Kerans, Mind and Labor. See in this same connection Bloch, Les Caractères, Chapter II, 21–65. Ester Boserup’s view that the issue of grazing rights on the fallow commonly acted...